By early afternoon, the police cars were gone, but the house still looked like a war had happened inside it. Francis walked through the rooms slowly. Stella a step behind him. Both of them quiet in a way that felt heavier than any argument could have been. Drywall dust covered the hallway floor like a thin layer of snow.
The kitchen cabinets hung open on broken hinges. In the living room, Francis crouched down and picked up the wedding photo from where it had been kicked across the floor. Glass shattered, the frame bent at one corner. He held it for a moment, running his thumb along the crack that split right through the middle of Stella's smiling face in the picture. They didn't even move it, he said quietly.
Just stepped over it and kept going. Stella didn't say anything. She sat down slowly on the arm of the couch, the only piece of furniture that hadn't been flipped or torn open, and stared at the hole in the hallway wall where the sledgehammer had gone through. I keep waiting to feel like this is real, she said. It doesn't feel real yet.
Francis set the broken frame down gently on the coffee table, careful with it now in a way the officers hadn't been. It's real, he said. It's going to feel a lot more real tomorrow when the insurance adjusters show up and tell us we can't sleep here tonight. He wasn't wrong. A city inspector had already come by an hour earlier, taped off part of the staircase where the structural wall had been opened up, and told them flatly that the house wasn't safe to stay in until repairs were made.
They'd be staying with Stella's sister for a while. Nobody knew exactly how long. Francis moved toward the staircase, stepping carefully around the caution tape, and knelt down near the small closet tucked beneath it. He reached past a stack of old shoe boxes and ran his hand along the wall until his fingers found the edge of a small fireproof lock box bolted into the floor joist untouched by the search. Whatever the officers had been looking for, they'd never thought to look here.
It didn't look like a hiding place. It looked like clutter. He didn't open it. Not yet. He just rested his hand on top of it for a moment, feeling the cool metal, and something settled behind his eyes.
Not comfort exactly, but the beginning of a plan he couldn't fully see the shape of yet. Stella watched him from the couch. What is that? Something I've kept a long time, Francis said. It's not important right now.
He stood back up and walked over to her, sitting down beside her among the wreckage of their living room. For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Outside, a neighbor's dog was barking at something, and the sound of a car passing slowly on the street drifted through the broken front window. "What are you going to do?" Stella finally asked. Francis looked around the room at the shattered glass, the gutted walls, the family photo with the crack running through it like a scar.